And a vast paranoia sweeps
across the land
And America turns the attack
on its Twin Towers
Into the beginning of the Third
World War
The war with the Third World

And the terrorists in Washington
Are shipping out the young men
To the killing fields again

And no one speaks

And they are rousting out
All the ones with turbans
And they are flushing out
All the strange immigrants

And they are shipping all the
young men
To the killing fields again

And no one speaks

And when they come to round
up
All the great writers and poets
and painters
The National Endowment of the
Arts of Complacency
Will not speak

While all the young men
Will be killing all the young men
In the killing fields again

So now is the time for you to
speak
All you lovers of liberty
All you lovers of the pursuit of
happiness
All you lovers and sleepers
Deep in your private dream
Now is the time for you to speak
O silent majority
Before they come for you!

"There has
been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler,
Auschwitz, but was that their fault?
They see but one thing: we have
come and we have stolen their country.
Why would they accept that?"

"The great
failure in what the US is doing
is that it tries to win a battle
through military power and brutality,
... But history has a way of coming
back, and it is the role of the
intellectual to bring it back."

Edward
Said, March 2003

Why I Support the Academic Boycott of Israel By Eric Cheyfitz

On Sunday, the American Studies Association, of which I am a member, voted to support the academic boycott of Israel called for by Palestinian civil society. Included in their announcement of the vote are the statements of 13 scholars in support of the vote, among which I am included. Here is my statement:

I am a Jew with a daughter and three grandchildren who are citizens of Israel. I am a scholar of American Indian and Indigenous studies, who has in published word and action opposed settler colonialism wherever it exists, including of course the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It is worth noting in this respect that just as the myth of American exceptionalism seeks to erase the genocide and ongoing settler colonialism of Indigenous peoples here in the United States, so the myth of Israeli exceptionalism seeks to erase Israeli colonialism in Palestine and claim original rights to Palestinian lands. It is from these personal and professional positions that I applaud the decision of the NC to support the Academic boycott of Israel, which I support, and urge ASA members to affirm that support with their votes.

I offer the personal information in this statement so that people will know that I have an immediate interest in a just outcome for the Palestinian people, which would also be a just outcome for the state of Israel. Simply put, I want my grandchildren to grow up in a democracy, not in a state that proclaims itself a democracy while denying human rights to a population under its control — a population that has the right to a sovereign state of its own on territory currently under the colonial domination of Israel. We should remember that Palestinians on the West Bank live under Israeli marshal law. I also believe that in the long run Israel cannot survive caught in the vice of this political contradiction. And I want Israel to survive.

Professionally, I have my investments as well, to which the statement alludes. As a professor of Native American and Indigenous studies, I am acutely aware of how the agendas of settler colonialism — land grab being the primary one as it is in Palestine — actively decimated the Indigenous population of the United States from an initial estimate of four to five million in 1492 in what would become the lower 48 states to 250,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. While the Native population has been growing since then and since 1924 Native peoples are citizens of the U.S., nevertheless the lasting effects and ongoing forms of settler colonialism are instrumental in making Native peoples the poorest of the poor in the U.S.

American exceptionalism, of which Manifest Destiny is perhaps the best known form (the notion that the U.S. has a God-given democratizing mission in the world), has kept the U.S. and its people from facing its own genocidal history, a necessary step in beginning to move history in a progressive direction.

Israeli exceptionalism — the notion that the Jews are God’s chosen people, whether this is explicitly espoused as it is by certain settler groups on the West Bank, or implicitly followed as it appears to be by Israeli policy in relation to the Palestinians and their land — functions the same way as American exceptionalism, as an alibi for a history that tries to erase the facts on the ground.

There are of course both U.S. and Israeli scholars who acknowledge these facts in their scholarship and offer cogent critiques of the exceptionalist myths that try to erase them. Some of these scholars are no doubt supported by the very Israeli universities that are the object of the boycott, while the institutions themselves remain not only silent about Israeli oppression of the Palestinians but participate in it. But the boycott is not aimed at individual scholars, whatever their beliefs, and thus it does not impact academic freedom, which applies to the rights and responsibilities of individual scholars within institutions — not to institutions themselves.

I support the boycott, then, because these institutions need to be held accountable for their part in the ongoing colonization of Palestine. While diplomatic initiatives continue to fail, the boycott is one way of trying to move Israel toward a history of justice.

Eric Cheyfitz is the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University.

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Holding their green passports in their hands, people were hustling there and back while, making weird gestures on their faces, others were nervously shouting over their phones. From afar, a baby was crying out load as his mother, lulling him, patted him on the back so as to hush him. She restlessly trotted to an officer in a blue uniform seated on a chair at the gate. The wretched mother talked to the officer who politely replied to her making signs which I construed as I-can-not-help-you. She pleaded with him, and he repeated the same gestures. The officer was a good man, and it seemed he really couldn’t help her. On the right side of the road leading to the gateway, two cafes crowded with customers who were none other than the very passengers who had gathered in one of these two cafés so as to protect themselves from the burning sun of July in this morning.
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